Some images from a week of weird and unsettled but exciting and fun. It’s cold and hard to not beat myself down for being in bed and missing appointments. Also not sitting at the desk for long. Seeing and comparing is gentler but takes a strong will that lives outside. hard to get when you’re inside.

Idk why this dumb embed isn’t working but can you please watch Holley’s video All Round the Bend it’s so nice, it captures in the song his belief in divine intervention to create his artwork and that his artwork’s direction really comes from within.

Power of a Mother photographed in the artists Atlanta home by Gillian Gaub for NY Times

Holley is a man of many myths and talents. Born in Jim Crow-era Birmingham, Alabama, as the seventh of 27 children, Holley traveled across the South and held a wide array of jobs before making his first artwork at the age of 29.

Well known for his assemblages, Holley incorporates natural and man-made objects into totemic sculptures. Materials such as steel scrap, sandstone, plastic flowers, crosses, and defunct machines commemorate places, people, and events. The exhibition will feature a selection of sculptures and drawings on loan from the artist. In addition to these works, Holley will create site specific installations reflective of the spontaneous and improvisational nature of his creative process.

Thornton Dial was born on a cotton plantation and did steel work, never learning to read or write – and was a self-taught artist. Discovered by Lonnie Holley, he was later approached by Bill Arnett who bought Dial’s work into the white world of art. Controversy that tarnished the two men’s reputations provides insight into the life of black artists and ‘outsider’ art through the eyes of white art institutions. The positive return of the story becomes that the black artist is given legitimacy and been accepted, their art being taken in by the institutions that had initially devalued them.

This show was so so so cute and amazing gave my lots of giggles and had the works that had VR used it so well! A few things I noticed were layers of coloured pencil retarding a layer of paint and the use of text as texture constructed around other scrunchy shapes. Potentially accidental marks soothed me and the explanations of drawings were great.
A fantastic show to see while spending the day in the sun making herself that lives in a draw …